Gender Role Identity and Stress in African American Women

Abstract

Womanism is a feminist perspective that has recently been appropriated for social work practice with African American women (Littlefleld, in press). It emphasizes the centrality of gender role in African American women's psychosocial adaptation, and asserts that the archetypal gender role for this group incorporates both nurturing and economic providing functions. This gender role fluidity has been characterized both as a source of strength (Billingsley, 1992; Hill, 1999) and strain (Lewis, 1989; McAdoo, 1985). The present study empirically investigated the relationship between gender role identity and stress in African American women to clarify its adaptive value. The Bem Sex Role Inventory was used to classify subjects into groups based on the degree to which they identified themselves with stereotypically masculine and feminine traits. Women who endorsed high levels of both masculine and feminine traits experienced lower levels of stress than did other women. The findings indicate that gender role identity is a factor in African American women's psychosocial well-being, and that mainstream gender role norms may not be adequate for analyzing the experiences of this group.     

Toward a Theoretical Understanding of Hypermasculine Coping Among Urban Black Adolescent Males

Abstract

The literature regarding African American males has generally focused on the cultural or academic deficits of Black boys. This short-sighted approach fails to take into account the role of contextin shaping opportunities to complete normative developmental tasks. Further, such deficit perspectives leave few to no options for intervention. Consequently, a process-oriented and developmentally informed theoretical model (PVEST) was used to examine the relationships between risks, stress, and coping for a sample of urban Black adolescent males (n = 125). More specifically, the role of fear in promoting hypermasculine coping is explored. The results suggest that hypermasculine attitudes are a function of hypervulnerabilty. Coping-based intervention strategies are discussed.     

Measuring Adoptive Identity: Validation of the Adoptive Identity Work Scale

Guided by Erikson's as well as Grotevant and colleagues’ identity theorizing, three studies were conducted to assess the validity and reliability of the Adoptive Identity Work Scale (AIWS), a self-report measure of the identity work contributing to one's adoptive identity. Adult adoptees were solicited in a series of surveys (study 1: N = 196; study 2: N = 119; study 3: N = 217) to complete existing measures of adoptive identity and well-being as well as the newly formed AIWS. The studies reported here provide concurrent, construct, and predictive validity for the AIWS, consisting of five items measuring reflective exploration and five items measuring preoccupation.     

Communicative Openness in Adoption,Knowledge of Culture of Origin,and Adoption Identity in Adolescents Adopted From Romania

Eighty adolescents (39 male, mean age = 15.74 years) adopted from Romanian institutions in early childhood rated their own and their adoptive parents’ communicative openness, their knowledge of Romanian culture, and positive and negative feelings concerning birth parents, being placed for adoption, and being adopted. Adolescents were moderately comfortable talking about their adoptions but perceived their parents to be very comfortable. Nearly 40% reported no familiarity with Romanian culture. Youth with more familiarity with Romanian culture were more communicatively open and had more positive adoption identities. Greater communicative openness was also associated with more positive adoption identities. Gender and age at adoption differences are reported.     

Images of Jewish identities in Lithuanian literature of the twentieth century: Grigorii Kanovich and Markas Zingeris

This paper deals with the identity concept of two Lithuanian Jewish writers, Grigorii Kanovich and Markas Zingeris. Kanovich, as a member of the Holocaust generation, writing in Russian, depicts his protagonists as spiritual and hardworking people with strong self‐confidence, resting on religion and custom. By means of the narrative technique of memory, Kanovich creates a literary resurrection of the Lithuanian Jews as a people which was almost completely exterminated during the Holocaust. Omnipresent pictures of cemetery and grave transform the Lithuanian space into a metonymy of death and, grotesquely, to the only place of home, being the “shelter” for the killed bodies of the Lithuanian Jewry. Markas Zingeris, growing up in post‐war Soviet Lithuania, represents the concept of open identities, changeable in time and place. Calling himself a Lithuanian writer who has been raised within a Lithuanian, Jewish, and, not least, Soviet milieu, Zingeris depicts his protagonists in in‐between situations. Writing in Lithuanian, speaking several languages fluently and working as translator, Zingeris embodies the cosmopolite. At the same time, though, he is a writer of collective memory. He comments on the apparent loss of the great utopia of an autonomous identity with ironic melancholy, pointing instead to the rich variety of hybrid identities.     

House-building tradition of the shtetl in memorials and memories (based on materials of field studies in Podolia)

This study examines house-building traditions in the Podolian shtetl, as evidenced by surviving buildings and by the folk memory of building practices. Using oral sources, taken from extensive field research in Ukraine, the study considers the extent to which members of remaining Jewish communities in the former Pale of Settlement function as “carriers” of this folk memory, and what they can tell us about the manner in which Jewish houses in the shtetl were constructed and their meaning as socio-cultural spaces.     

Rethinking the Canon: Reflections on a Text That Ought to be Essential Reading

Abstract

The 2006 war in Lebanon that erupted between Hezbollah and Israel marked the largest evacuation of Americans abroad since World War II. This article captures the experiences of Lebanese-American women and investigates how gender identity was expressed during these evacuations. Presented from the point of view of a participant-observer and personal interviews, findings show that gender became a master identity that influenced these women's choices regarding how to escape the country and return to the United States. Some embraced dependency upon masculinist exercises of power while others claimed agency as they determined their own fate and carried out their own evacuation without waiting to be rescued by the state or male kin members. The evacuation stories in this article confirm and illuminate the complexity of ethnic citizenship and gendered agency.     

Ten years after Beijing

For fifteen years, in the north of the state of Israel, a women's organization existed in which Israeli Jewish and Israeli Palestinian women activists worked together for peace and justice in a careful and challenging dialogue across difference. “Bat Shalom of the North” was the subject of research by the author in 1996. In this article she reports on her return in 2012 to re-interview former members. Applying the feminist concept of “transversal politics” she analyzes the organization's trajectory, radicalization and eventual closure in the context of a failed peace process and increasing violence in the region. Their perspective on Israel's oppression of its Palestinian minority led the surviving members of Bat Shalom of the North in its final days to envision not a “two-state solution” to the Israel Palestine conflict but a single, inclusive, multicultural and democratic country, in which subject identities are built not on a feeling of belonging to land, language or religion but on shared adhesion to human and democratic rights.     

Cop Rock: Protest,Identity, and Dancing Riot Police in Jordan

Social movement scholars have long studied actors' mobilization into and continued involvement in social movement organizations. A more recent trend in social movement literature concerns cultural activism that takes place primarily outside of social movement organizations. Here I use the vegan movement to explore modes of participation in such diffuse cultural movements. As with many cultural movements, there are more practicing vegans than there are members of vegan movement organizations. Using data from ethnographic interviews with vegans, this article focuses on vegans who are unaffiliated with a vegan movement organization. The sample contains two distinctive groups of vegans – those in the punk subculture and those who were not – and investigates how they defined and practiced veganism differently. Taking a relational approach to the data, I analyze the social networks of these punk and non-punk vegans. Focusing on discourse, support, and network embeddedness, I argue that maintaining participation in the vegan movement depends more upon having supportive social networks than having willpower, motivation, or a collective vegan identity. This study demonstrates how culture and social networks function to provide support for cultural movement participation.     

Towards ‘New Emotional Movements’? A Comparative Exploration into a Specific Movement Type

In this article we broaden the scope of earlier research that established a theoretical specificity for the Belgian ‘White March’ and ‘White Movement’, by comparing them to three similar movements and mobilizations that were also triggered by random violence. The comparisons suggest that we are dealing with a new type of social movement and mobilization, preliminarily referred to as ‘new emotional movements’. The three other cases under study are the ‘Snowdrop Campaign’ in the UK, the ‘Million Mom March’ in the US and the ‘Movement against Senseless Violence’ in the Netherlands. Four important features seem to characterize all cases: the central role of emotions and victimization in the mobilization and development of the movement; broad elite support; organizational weakness; and extensive media support. We distinguish two sub-types of new emotional movements: (1) an instrumental variant with clear-cut aims and demands; and (2) an identity variant with displays of solidarity and compassion as the main constitutive elements. In both cases the initiators lack prior organizational experience and the absence of mobilizing organizations is compensated for by mass media support. In the instrumental sub-type neither the victims nor their relatives take the initiative but lend support and give approval to amateur entrepreneurs. The main mobilizing emotion appears to be fear about the possibility of personal suffering, and this emotion is reflected in the formulation of clear-cut demands for the future prevention of similar events. This instrumentality results in elite support being considerably broad, yet partisan. In contrast, the victims themselves take the initiative in the identity variant, causing the movement to remain more or less without specific demands but ensuring a broad support that is not bounded by party lines.